The Writers of Wales Database

CLARKE, GILLIAN

Blaen Cwrt, Talgarreg, Llandysul, Ceredigion SA44 4EU
Tel: 01545 590311
Website: http://www.gillianclarke.co.uk/home.htm
Audiovisual footage available here
For event booking details click here

Poet, writer, playwright, editor, translator (from Welsh) and occasional broadcaster. She is president of Tŷ Newydd writers’ centre in Gwynedd, which she co–founded in 1990 as well as a tutor on the M.Phil studies course in Creative Writing, University of Glamorgan. Gillian is also a freelance tutor of creative writing. She is an Honorary fellow of Aberystwyth, Cardiff and Swansea Colleges of the University of Wales. Her most recent projects include Bioverse, poems for the Welsh National Botanical Gardens 1999–2000; The Blue Man (play for BBC Radio 4); and One Bright Morning, a translation of the Welsh novel Tegwch y Bore by Kate Roberts (forthcoming).

Gillian Clarke was appointed Wales’ first Capital Poet in 2005 by Cardiff Council and the Academi. She was given the job of using poetry to comment on, celebrate and commemorate Cardiff’s 2005 celebrations. Gillian was announced as Wales’ new National Poet in March 2008, succeeding Professor Gwyn Thomas. Please click here for more information.

Her prose essays, articles and reviews are widely published. Translations of her work by T Llew Jones, Menna Elfyn and Kate Roberts have been published. Gillian’s commisions include radio and television material, as well as plays for Theatr Powys and Sherman Youth Theatre and for broadcast by the BBC. She has been involved in various editing projects from the Anglo Welsh Review (1976-1984) through to anthologies of children’s poetry by children. Gillian is a member of the Academi Members’ Committee and a Fellow of Academi.

You can hear Gillian read her poetry on her latest CD Twenty Poems which is available to buy from her website.  For further details click here.

Reviews:

“…Gillian Clarke’s outer and inner landscapes are the sources from which her poetry draws its strengths…”
Carol Ann Duffy, The Guardian

”…Gillian Clarke’s [poems] ring with lucidity and power…Clarke’s work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical…”
Anne Stevenson, Times Literary Supplement


Selected Publications:
Snow on the Mountain (Christopher Davies, 1971)
The Sundial (Gomer, 1978)
Letter From a Far Country (Carcanet, 1982; 2006)
The King of Britain’s Daughter (Carcanet Press, 1993)
Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1997)
Five Fields (Carcanet, 1998)
Nine Green Gardens: Poems for Aberglasne (Gomer, 1999)
The Animal Wall and Other Poems (for children) (Pont Books, 1999)
Making Beds for the Dead (Carcanet, 2004)
At the Source (Carcanet, 2008)
Recipe for Water (Carcanet, 2009)
Ice (Carcanet, October 2012)

Contributed to:
I Can Move the Sea - 100 Poems by Children (editor) (Pont, 1996)
Owain Glyn D?r 1400-2000 (co-writer) (National Library of Wales, 2000)
Magpies - Short Stories from Wales (contributor) (Gomer, 2000)
Cusan Dyn Dall / Blind Man’s Kiss (contributor) (Bloodaxe, 2001)
Places - An Anthology (contributor) (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2003)
The Big Book of Cardiff (contributor) (Seren, 2005)
Childhood - An Anthology for Grown-Ups (contributor) (Seren, 2005)
Moment of Earth - Poems & Essays in Honour of Jeremy Hooker (contributor) (Celtic Studies Publications, 2007)
Library of Wales: Poetry 1900-2000 (contributor) (Parthian, 2007)
Poems of Love and Longing (contributor) (Pont, 2008)
The Kingfisher Book of Scary Poems (editor) (Kingfisher Books, 2008)
Tegwch y Bore / One Bright Morning by Kate Roberts (translator) (Gomer, 2008)
Y Lon Wen / The White Lane by Kate Roberts (translator) (Gomer, 2009)

The King of Britain’s Daughter (Carcanet Press, 1993)

A variety of vivid poems including the title poem based on the story of Branwen in the Mabinogion commissioned as the text of an oratorio for the 1993 Hay-on-Wye Festival.

To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover







Recipe for Water (Carcanet, 2009)
 

In her first collection since becoming the National Poet of Wales in 2008, Gillian Clarke explores water as memory and meaning, the bearer of stories that well up from a personal and collective past to return us to the language of the imagination in which we first named the world.

To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover





 

In Ice Gillian Clarke turns to the real winters of 2009 and 2010. In their extremity they redefined all the seasons for her. Nature asserted itself and renewed the environment for the imagination. The poem ‘Polar’ is the poet’s point de repère, evoking a polar-bear rug she had as a child and here resurrects in a spirit of personal and ecological longing that becomes a creative act. She lives with the planet, its seasons and creatures, in a joyful, anxious communion.